u/jlyblybn

20 eggs, 11 fertilised, 0 made it to day 3

Hello. My husband (37M) and I (34F) have been TTC for 2 years. Our diagnosis is unexplained fertility as all tests on both of us have come back absolutely fine and we’re both healthy with no current or prior medical issues. We’ve had 3 unsuccessful rounds of IUI this year, and I had my first IVF egg retrieval last week.

They got 20 eggs, of which 11 fertilised. We received the call yesterday (day 3) that none of the eggs had made it to the next stage of development. As I understand it, at that point they’d be looking for a certain amount of cell division (5 cells?), and all of ours only had 2, 3, or 4 cells.

Naturally we’re devastated. The embryologist we spoke to wasn’t able to offer any explanations as to what has happened just yet. The clinic are going to keep all of them in their culture system and continue to observe them for the rest of the week, and apparently they should be able to tell more in a few days (once they’ve gotten past what would have been day 5 if any of them had been viable). However, based on what she did say I’m not holding out much hope for any kind of concrete explanation as it sounds like it could be a number of factors.

It feels so incredibly dramatic that that number of eggs could all fail almost immediately. I wondered if anyone has any similar experience but also if there’s any advice on questions we should ask at our next appointments - both about the failure itself and adjustments for the next cycle. For additional context we’re based in the UK and have one more cycle available funded through the NHS, and then we’ll be on our own.

Hello. My husband (37M) and I (34F) have been TTC for 2 years. Our diagnosis is unexplained fertility as all tests on both of us have come back absolutely fine and we’re both healthy with no current or prior medical issues. We’ve had 3 unsuccessful rounds of IUI this year, and I had my first IVF egg retrieval last week.

They got 20 eggs, of which 11 fertilised. We received the call yesterday (day 3) that none of the eggs had made it to the next stage of development. As I understand it, at that point they’d be looking for a certain amount of cell division (5 cells?), and all of ours only had 2, 3, or 4 cells.

Naturally we’re devastated. The embryologist we spoke to wasn’t able to offer any explanations as to what has happened just yet. The clinic are going to keep all of them in their culture system and continue to observe them for the rest of the week, and apparently they should be able to tell more in a few days (once they’ve gotten past what would have been day 5 if any of them had been viable). However, based on what she did say I’m not holding out much hope for any kind of concrete explanation as it sounds like it could be a number of factors.

It feels so incredibly dramatic that that number of eggs could all fail almost immediately. I wondered if anyone has any similar experience but also if there’s any advice on questions we should ask at our next appointments - both about the failure itself and adjustments for the next cycle. We have one more cycle available funded through the NHS, and then we’ll be on our own.